Mozilla’s Rust language was conceived by its designers as an option to write many kinds of software quickly and safely — including full operating systems. Over the last several months a team of developers has been busy doing exactly that: using Rust to create Redox, a full-blown Unix-like operating system designed as a radical rethinking of the Linux approach.
Clean slate
Redox uses Rust for its kernel-level code to provide more memory safety considerations than C allows by default. But the project doesn’t simply rewrite Linux in a new language. Redox discards as much from Linux’s version of the Unix tradition as it keeps. As explained in the project’s wiki and design documents, Redox uses a minimal set of syscalls — a deliberately smaller subset than what Linux supports so as to avoid legacy bloat.
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